


the day it all began

by WomanOf1000Faces



Series: Through the Drifting Sands of Time [1]
Category: Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: Gen, Susan is the Doctor, companions as the Doctor, learning how to deal with humans, mentions of other first doctor companions, the Doctor is still here but he's not called that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:56:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28491270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WomanOf1000Faces/pseuds/WomanOf1000Faces
Summary: In which the Doctor leaves Gallifrey with her grandfather, chooses a name, finds and loses a family, and grows up.
Relationships: First Doctor & Susan Foreman, Ian Chesterton & First Doctor & Susan Foreman & Barbara Wright
Series: Through the Drifting Sands of Time [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2087013
Kudos: 3





	the day it all began

**Author's Note:**

> The premise for this series was more or less inspired by RandomBattlecry's "Promises, Promises (Explosions, Explosions)", in which Clara is the Time Lord calling herself the Doctor, and the Doctor is a professor and her human companion. So naturally I decided to remix all of Doctor Who with the Doctor's regenerations as various companions. It'll make sense when you read it.
> 
> All titles within the series are from "Carried Me With You" by Brandi Carlile.

She’s not even an adult by her people’s standards when her grandfather invites her to leave Gallifrey with him, not old enough for a proper name of her own. The leaving is good - she already knows she will never be able to stand it here - but the lack of a name (to her total surprise) turns out to be a problem.

On Gallifrey, namelessness wouldn’t be a problem in and of itself, because people would understand that she just didn’t have one yet and that was okay. They might look down their noses at her because she was young, but they wouldn’t look at her like she’d lost her mind and needed to be locked in a padded room and fed soft foods. The first time she says, “Oh, I don’t have a name”, and gets that look, she thinks it’s just that planet. No, it’s every planet, every culture they visit, and Grandfather tries to protect them both from the people who get the wrong idea, but this him isn’t as young as it once was, and they need a better solution.

She takes to spending long hours with the databanks of their stolen TARDIS, going over naming conventions for all the listed planets so that when they visit places, she can have pseudonyms ready. 

Then one day they’re on Earth (again) and somebody mistakes her for a medical professional that they’ve called for, and she doesn’t even get the chance to make up a name because all she has to say is “Yes, I’m the doctor,” and everybody acts like that is her name. And after all, why shouldn’t it be? Yes, it’s technically a title, but there are plenty of people on Gallifrey who take titles as their names. The friend of Grandfather’s who calls himself the Master comes to mind, as do the Castellan and the Lord President. 

So ‘the Doctor’ (capitalized for emphasis) becomes her name, even in places where that gets her the odd look or two. Grandfather is a little surprised by her choice, more because she’s still not reached the one hundred twenty-five years that bring adulthood than because he thinks it’s strange. But she likes it, likes the way that it means the same thing no matter where they go. It marks her as a person here to help, to make things better. And after all the adventures she’s had, the things she’s seen and the running she’s done, she’s pretty sure she counts as an adult by any standard that matters.

On Earth, rapidly becoming her favorite planet, she can still pass for a teenager, however, and during a vacation/repair stop in the twentieth century there, she amuses herself by infiltrating a nearby high school, just to see what it’s like. Grandfather keeps busy with his maintenance work - he’s better with the mechanical end of things than she is - but she wants to learn more about the local culture, even if he thinks it’s silly.

Of course it goes sideways. Of course those two teachers follow her home - not just to the junkyard, but right in, into the TARDIS even. Of course Grandfather gets into a fight with them and they all end up flying off in an only partially repaired ship to several thousand years in the past.

It all works out much better than she would have initially thought, even if it takes a while. The teachers - Ian and Barbara - are afraid and angry and desperately want to go home. Grandfather is also angry, and more afraid than he wants to admit, and would like nothing better than to take them home, but the TARDIS is not cooperating even a little. The Doctor privately thinks that having traveling companions other than Grandfather is fun, but most of all she wants the three of them to be happy.

And in time, once they accept that they’re stuck with each other and they’d better learn to live with it, they are happy. They are even, on occasion, like the family units she’s seen on Earth and other planets, with two parents and a child and a grandparent, except that she never knew anything like that on Gallifrey and she’s technically older than either of the two humans. If the Doctor were human, she would probably say she loved them.

It can’t last, naturally. They find a way to send Ian and Barbara home, and the couple goes back to their proper time and place. The Doctor tries not to feel betrayed by what is after all a perfectly reasonable choice.

There are other humans and humanoids who end up joining her and Grandfather on their travels after that, because apparently once you’ve started picking up companions you’re doomed to never stop, or something. Dodo, Stephen, Sara, Katarina, Ben, Polly...they’re all good and decent people, who the Doctor grows to care for, but none of them are Ian and Barbara. And none of them stay.

Well, to be fair, Ben and Polly haven’t left yet, but the Doctor suspects it’s only a matter of time. Or maybe the choice won’t even be theirs - their latest adventure, an invasion of Earth (of course) by Cybermen, has already seen something of a body count start to pile up, and she knows by now that the people who travel with her are far from safe.

In the end, she doesn’t lose Polly or Ben. She loses Grandfather. 

When she and Ben break into the Cybermen’s ship for a rescue, Polly is crying and gibbering and clinging to the body of a ginger man in sickeningly familiar clothes. It takes a long time to calm the girl enough to talk coherently, but the Doctor has pieced together the story well before that point. The Cybermen tried to kill Grandfather, and when it didn’t take, they killed him over and over again until he ran out of regenerations.

The Doctor has seen vids of Time Lords caught in regeneration loops until they die. It made her sick then, and it would make her sick now, to think of that happening to Grandfather, except that now somebody has to be the leader of their ragtag little party, and it can’t be either of the shell-shocked humans so it has to be her.

She does pretty well for the first five minutes or so. She gets Ben to help her with...with the body, after patiently explaining that yes, it is still Grandfather. She gets them all moving, to find a way out of there. She gets her friends off the ship.

Unfortunately, she also sets off a trap that blows up the ship and comes very close to burning her alive. The firestorm doesn’t kill her (although it does handle the cremation problem she hadn’t been prepared to deal with yet) - but the shrapnel gives it a pretty good shot.

The Doctor watches numbly as blood soaks her sweater around the jagged metal buried in her stomach.  
Ben gets her back to the TARDIS somehow. The Doctor does her best to keep the regeneration at bay until he puts her down, moves a safe distance away in a quest for a med kit.

She’s just barely cognizant of Polly’s screams as the burning light takes over.


End file.
